The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to a spatiotemporal encounters detection and, more specifically, but not exclusively, to a spatiotemporal encounters detection in historical movement dataset.
With the widespread adoption of location aware technologies, such as global positioning system (GPS) and radio frequency identification (RFID), huge amounts of data about moving objects are captured and stored in digital repositories. The moving objects may be people, animals, shipping containers, ships, buses and airplanes. The movement of objects may be captured by recording their locations at regular or irregular time steps.
An important class of movement patterns deals with the movement of objects in relation to one another. For example, this may involve finding two nearby ships that are moving in the same direction and speed for some period of time and finding two cars that pass through the same road junction within a given time window. These two examples belong to encounter patterns of objects being close to one another in space and time. Encounters may be further classified into specific types based on additional attributes of the moving objects, such as direction and speed.